jforman

Agreed. Entrepreneurs always see opportunity in disruption, because you can always rebuild something better. Just don't @ me too hard for pointing out that the disruption is real and will affect the ecosystem (including startups!) as it is today.

It's certainly possible new channels emerge to restore equilibrium, but I don't see Neeva (or whoever) replacing Google as a customer acquisition channel any time soon.

I think people are misconstruing me here. I'm not saying Google advertising is somehow fundamentally necessary to the economy. I'm just saying that it is straight up incorrect to think that there aren't legitimate downsides to removing their ability to police fraud.

Let's say you're a startup trying to advertise on Google, and somebody has paid a bot network to fraudulently click on your ads. Now Google can't detect that those clicks are fraudulent, so you're billed for them.

Your channel efficiency unavoidably goes down, which increases your cost of customer acquisition because your other channels cannot pick up all of the slack.

Increasing the cost of customer acquisition is going to be bad for your business. You will either need to reduce costs (by hiring less, for example), or increase your prices.

Because it makes advertising more expensive, which in turn makes the products and services you use more expensive.

There is no mens rea or actual harm involved in legit white hat hacking, including white hat hacking that is incentivized through bug bounties, so this activity is not criminal.

We don't know all of the specifics here, but for the feds to go after it one must assume that there was mens rea for the underlying offense (i.e., the hackers were in fact black hat) and there was actual harm (i.e., the hackers kept the stolen data and either intended to or did in fact use it for criminal purposes).

And in order to go after charges of obstruction and misprision, the DoJ must also believe that Sullivan was clearly aware that this behavior was criminal, and he intentionally sought to cover it up. This isn't much of a stretch because the FTC was probing it, so there was ample opportunity for him to respond incorrectly (and, allegedly, criminally) to FTC's questions during their probe.

I was at Microsoft, in MSN Search (which was later re-branded Bing). This was 2003.

When I worked at Bing almost 20 years ago, the #1 search term was "Google". So maybe this is reasonable :)

(#2 was "Gogle")

You can't design interventions for problems that you cannot see. Detection alone doesn't save lives, but it is a necessary step to the discovery of interventions that do.

tl;dr any unique feature of this virus may be explanatory for its demonstrably increased virulence, and may be targetable by existing therapeutics as well. This particular feature is a candidate finding of this type — the specific molecular biology involved isn't particularly important for non-molecular biologists (I was one in a past life).

It's a bit of a stretch to say that a lawsuit is a threat to the rule of law.....

Fair enough. Although I think a researcher would say our bags of meat often surprise us.